Proper 23

The gospel for today begs allegory and analogy, leading inevitably to dividing people into groups of good and bad. It is an invitation to play the Blame Game. Coupled with our innate curiosity, like Pandora, we cannot help but want to know just who is going to be bound hand and foot and cast into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth! I suspect that as we hear this read, we all have candidates that leap to mind. It is the rare person who may reflect on why he or she might be that unlucky soul whose only sin appears to be not making the acceptable fashion statement for the occasion.

No matter how one parses this particular parable in Matthew, the results are baffling at best. Particularly in light of the fact that, at the end of the day, it simply means to express how passionately our God wants us to come to his banquet – how passionately our God wants us to come home – how passionately our God loves us – all of us – all of the time. Many are called, says our Lord, but few are chosen. What remains mysteriously hidden and unsaid here is that it is we who do the choosing. Few choose to return to God, too busy are they wasting time on inconsequential disputes over what is right and what is wrong.

Which message is also at the heart of Paul’s correspondence with the Christ-followers in Philippi. He returns to the theme with which he began: there is no time for bickering, and no time to contemplate retribution against those who imprison me and those who hate us. There is simply no time for anything but the Love of God in Christ Jesus crucified and raised from the dead.

So please, get these two magnificent women, women who have struggled with me to proclaim the good news, get them back together again. Once you reconcile them you can rejoice! “And again I will say, Rejoice! The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything. Then you can get on with the business at hand: spreading the Good News of Christ crucified and raised from the dead.”

Paul is in prison and he believes this is the only way to be: joyful in the Lord. Be joyful in the Lord all you lands! Jubilate Deo! “And the Peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus…Keep doing the things that you have learned and received…and the God of Peace will be with you.”

Just what “things” have the Philippians learned? When Paul left Macedonia, he issued an invitation to the churches he knew to enter into partnership with him – a partnership of money and ministry. It was to be a partnership of giving and receiving. It is in giving with Christ that we receive, it is in dying with Christ that we live. Christ, who did not consider equality with God something to be exploited, emptied himself, and invites us to do the same. Of all the churches with which Paul was associated – Rome, Corinth, Thessalonica, Colossae, Galatia, Ephesus, and Philippi – it was only the Philippians who responded to his invitation. It was only the Philippians who sent Paul help, sending one of their own, Epaphroditus, who nearly died while serving Paul in prison.

Paul is the first pastoral counselor. He is sending them encouragement in hard times. He reminds the Philippians that they know what to do and how to do it. He has personally benefitted from their faithfulness in Christ Jesus. They have sacrificed money and gifts and nearly one of their own to further the spread of the good news of Jesus Christ – that God is at home and it is we who need to return to his banquet hall, fully prepared to do the work God calls us to do in Christ Jesus.

Paul’s gift to us is the realization that the Church of Jesus Christ goes way beyond any single person or congregation. It is a vast network of congregations and peoples working together, sacrificing for one another, supporting one another.

But it is we who want to be left alone by the God who has made the most inconvenient men and women our neighbors – and instructed us to love them as much as we love God and love ourselves!

Against this backdrop, writes Paul, there is simply no time for division and argument. And there is no way to go it alone. Stop the dissension and disagreement right now. Disengage from worldly concerns and engage yourselves in God’s work – “And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches.”

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s final book of The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee, an uncommonly courageous little Hobbit, wakes up after the climactic battle. Thinking everything is lost, he discovers all his friends are around him. He cries out to Gandalf the great wizard, “I thought you were dead. But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

Is everything sad going to come untrue? For those of us who believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s answer is a resounding, “Yes!”

Many are called, says our Lord Jesus, but few are chosen. It is we who do the choosing. Are we ready to choose? Are we ready to choose to keep doing the things that we have learned and received? Are we ready to move on and leave controversy behind us?

For if we are, the God of Peace shall be with us wherever we are, wherever we go. And everything sad will come untrue. Because our God passionately wants us to come to his banquet. And our God passionately wants us to come home. And our God will passionately supply every need, including finding us a new home in Christ Jesus. Our God will make sure that everything sad will come untrue.

So, it is that even from a prison cell, Saint Paul urges us to Rejoice!

And again I will say, Rejoice!

The Lord is near.

The peace of God which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus every step of the way!

Amen.

Written by the Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek. Ordained in the Diocese of Chicago in 1983, I served as a parish priest in the dioceses of Chicago, Connecticut and Maryland. After nearly 18 years as rector of St. Peter’s in Ellicott City, MD, I spent six years as Chaplain and teacher at St. Timothy’s School for Girls, an Episcopal and international boarding and day-school in Stevenson, MD. In the mid-1980’s I was trained to work as a Stewardship Consultant through the Office of Stewardship at the Episcopal Church Center. I also helped to lead retreats for the Ministry of Money, a ministry of the Church of the Saviour, Washington, DC. Recently retired from full-time parish ministry, I do Interim and Supply work throughout the Diocese of Maryland. I also continue a lifetime as a drummer in various rock and jazz bands, currently playing with On The Bus, a Grateful Dead tribute band centered in the greater DC Metro region. I also use guitar and write music to supplement worship and the preaching event. Some of these songs can be seen on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/user/SoundsDivine1. My sermons are archived at www.perechief.blogspot.com, and I have been writing for Sermons that Work for as long as I can remember! Feel free to contact me at kkub@aol.com.

Today’s gospel passage probably requires a bit of translation. There’s a big difference between the cultural expectations of first-century Palestine and 21st-century America. Not only about marriage, of course – but marriage is what today’s gospel highlights.

Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a marriage feast given by a slave-owning king. Now, slave-owning kings were quite common back then. Fortunately, neither human bondage nor absolute monarchy is part of our day-to-day experience now. This isn’t to say we have wiped out oppression or tyranny on the face of the earth – far from it. But at least in this nation, we call it a crime when one person claims to own another, and we do not permit anyone to have absolute power. They weren’t quite ready for “checks and balances” in Jesus’ time.

So – in and of itself – the progress of 2,000 years will require us to make a kind of adjustment in order to hear and understanding this parable.

So, too, will the whole idea of marriage. There are those who insist that our modern-day, state-sanctioned unions are a sacred institution, implying that this phenomenon is of ancient provenance. One president even called marriage “one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization.” Of course, that is not the case.

Now, marriage is a fine thing. But what do we really know about the history of marriage? What are the facts?

Scholar Kenneth Stevenson, who was Bishop of Portsmouth, in England, summarized marriage in the patriarchal tradition of ancient Judaism in his book “To Join Together”: first, negotiation of contract, then betrothal, followed by consummation.

What may be hard for us to imagine is that the contract negotiated was no Philadelphia lawyer’s prenup agreement; it was a financial contract between two men, the bride’s father and the groom. In the time of Jesus, women were exchanged like plots of land and herds of cattle – just so much property. The men owned them.

The period of betrothal, then, was not so much a time in which two persons got to know each other better and grew closer in love – but a kind of “grace period” in which the groom could cancel the contract – for some justifiable cause, but without penalty.

Remember that Joseph, when betrothed to Mary, chose not to exercise his option to wiggle out of his marriage contract. He could have, because she was pregnant, but he didn’t. And it’s a good thing, too. Had he done so, none of us Christians would exist.

And in the first century, before anything so technological as birth control, women were like human childbirth machines. They would marry at age 11 or 12 or 13, and immediately begin to have children. Typically, a child every year or so for maybe 10 years. Lots of these children died in infancy. And most of these women died by the age of 30.

So the men would remarry – another teenage bride – again and again. It was not at all uncommon for a man of 40 or 50 or even 60 to marry again: each time a child bride, bought from her father.

This, of course, is not a fundamental, enduring institution of our civilization, is it? It’s more of an oppressive mess and a muddle, out of which we humans have managed to climb. And thanks be to God for that!

Now, what of the actual church liturgy for marriage? Although there is mention of marriage celebrations here and there in ancient texts, the formal, standard, official liturgy of the church dates only to about the 12th century.

What appears to have happened is that the tradition of holding a marriage feast was appropriated into the church’s liturgy. The cultural observance became, over time, a religious one.

To say that more clearly: there is no evidence of an official religious rite for marriage in Jesus’ time. Marriage was entirely a domestic and civil affair. If you were very wealthy, you might invite a rabbi or Pharisee or even High Priest of the Temple to attend, maybe even lead some prayers – but this was unusual, not the standard. This is why there are accounts of Jesus performing miracles at wedding feasts, but no record of him preaching a wedding homily. There was no such thing.

So, a man works out a deal with a woman’s father, and she is ordered to go and live with that man – someone she may not even have met. After a period of a year or more, the man decides that this is working out, and he and his contractual partner (not his bride, her father) lays on a feast.

Remember, this was long before clocks and calendars were common household items. You didn’t send out engraved invitations in the mail, or an e-vite to your fellow bloggers. You sent out messengers – slaves, if you were fortunate to own them – to invite everyone to the marriage feast. Come to the feast; it’s happening right now, today.

And pretty much everyone would come. In those days, ordinary people owned two changes of clothing: your regular, everyday work clothes; and a festive garment, a wedding robe – something usually white, that you kept clean and unwrinkled. And most people did not own much more. When the messengers came to invite you to a marriage, or you heard that bell ring – you would just pen up your sheep, drop your weaving, whatever; run home and put on your wedding garment; and go to the party.

And what feasts these were! Not the luxurious, self-indulgent and obscenely expensive extravaganzas we know today, but festive gatherings nonetheless, frequently lasting for days on end.

Same kind of thing, for instance, as when the Prodigal Son returned: roasted fatted calf, music and merriment, giving of gifts, and lots of wine. No evidence of cake, or throwing garters or rice, or making toasts, or even an exchange of vows. And no mortgaging of the homestead to borrow money; the party simply lasted until you slaughtered your last calf and drank the last of the wine.

Much has changed in the sacred institution of marriage, and thanks be to God for that! And much will continue to change. Thanks be to God for that, too.

So, what relevance does this gospel passage hold for us, if marriage is so radically different in our culture and in our church?

This, too, may be hard for us to grasp, as we no longer live in a culture with a lot of clear implicit expectations.

This may have been true in the United States of the 1950s, and it certainly was true in the Palestine of Jesus’ time: Everybody just sort of understood what the standards were – at least with regard to the wedding garment.

If you live in Galilee or Bethlehem, you knew that to come to a wedding feast was to wear a wedding garment.

So this parable, which seems harsh – after all, someone is thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth for wearing the wrong clothes. But perhaps this parable is about participation, or the lack of doing it fully.

There is the first group, who simply decline the invitation. And then there is the guy without the wedding robe, who refused to participate completely.

If you were you the king, you would feel snubbed and insulted by these people, right? If you had the power, you might send those folks who offended you to the outer darkness, right? Or at least, you’d be tempted to. Come on, admit it. When someone offends you, you are tempted to retaliate. We all are.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. This is a parable, remember. An analogy of the Kingdom of Heaven, a story of the way God acts in the world.

God has invited us to be partners in the building up of that kingdom, on earth as in heaven. We are invited to the greatest feast ever imagined. And how many of us fully participate all of the time? Precious few.

And this omnipotent God, who could reign down fire from heaven and smite us where we sit – this God does not act like the king in today’s story, although he could. God does not enforce the dress code or punish us for not participating fully.

Instead, our God invites us again and again, over and over. We are called to that feast of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. The feast at which the disgrace of the people will be taken away from the earth, when God will wipe away the tears from all faces.

You, me and every person on this planet are welcome at this table.

When God is the host, everyone is invited. Sadly, as in today’s parable, not everyone comes – but everyone is invited.

When God is the host, the food is rich beyond our imagination or understanding. Sometimes it appears to be quite simple – like bread and wine – yet we can be profoundly moved and transformed by this feast. When God is the host, we are nourished not just for the morning, but for the journey. For most of us, this sustenance lasts as long as week, for others it lasts a lifetime. And when God is the host, everyone gets the same gift: the amazingly abundant, undeserved, and inexhaustible gift of love.

— The Rev. Dr. Barrie Bates is serving in interim ministry in the metropolitan New York area and as editor of church reviews for the journal Anglican and Episcopal History.

Isn’t today’s gospel reading the darndest parable? The whole thing just sort of jerks along, and doesn’t quite work – especially when you get to the poor fellow who is tossed into the outer darkness for violating the dress code. Puzzling. Let’s unpack it a little and maybe make it a bit easier to grasp.

First of all, this is one of those parables in which the writer, here it’s Matthew, takes a story of Jesus and re-works it for his own purposes. You can see another version of this parable – probably one a lot closer to the one Jesus told – in the fourteenth chapter of Luke. What Matthew does is sort of soup up the story so it isn’t exactly a street-legal parable anymore. Instead, it becomes an allegory of salvation history – a way of telling what Matthew sees as the central movements of God’s actions and plans for all of human history.

Since it’s an allegory and not a parable, we don’t need to bother too much about whether the details of the thing make sense the way they do with regular parables. So, for example, we don’t need to worry about how the king keeps dinner warm while he makes war against the first set of invited guests, destroys their city, and then has the banquet in that same city on pretty much the same day. That sort of thing is no problem in an allegory.

In this allegory, the first guests stand for Israel. The first two sets of slaves who issue the invitation represent the prophets of the old covenant, which is why some of them are beaten up and killed, hardly the usual way of declining an invitation. The city that is destroyed represents Jerusalem.

In the second part of the allegory, the slaves who are sent into the main streets to invite just anybody are the apostles, the followers of Jesus after the resurrection, who brought the church together. And the church, Matthew knew all too well, was filled with both good and bad, righteous and unrighteous, deserving and undeserving. After all, “everyone” means everyone: good, bad, and indifferent. The second crowd is very different from the first group, just as the church was very different from the leaders of Israel.

So, here we are. The wedding hall is filled with all sorts of guests. This precise moment in the story is Matthew’s present, the world, right then, as he knew it. It is also the world as we know it: the present age of the church.

Matthew is expressing the early Christian belief that, in spite of the words of the prophets and of John the Baptist, Israel, especially Israel’s leaders, had repeatedly ignored God’s invitation to his great messianic banquet for his son Jesus. So they are rejected, and the church is formed by the apostles. Remember, the apostles are represented in this allegory by the slaves who are sent to everybody else, to the lower classes, to women, to the gentiles, to the ones who had been ignored. And the apostles are told not to judge, but to invite. That was the way things were when Matthew used this parable of Jesus to tell the story of salvation history.

What happens next is big. Real big. What happens next is the end of all things, the second coming, the final judgment. The King arrives. And the King comes, apparently for the first time, to see his guests, to see who has managed to stumble or to be dragged into the party.

Now, at this point, a lot of Biblical scholars become very interested in the poor guy who gets tossed out. All sorts of things have been written about why he gets the boot, which mostly has to do with guessing what the reference to a “wedding robe” or a “wedding garment” meant back then. Since nobody really knows what a “wedding robe” means, the guesses have run amuck. They have included everything from ordinary clean clothes to a robe everybody supposedly had hanging in their house if they would only take a second to pick it up, to the white garments often given to newly baptized Christians.

Some interpreters even say the problem is the man’s silence, not his clothes. Still others like to talk about an inner state or condition. Some say the wedding robe is a metaphor for a “garment of good works.” Saint Augustine said that the wedding robe was “love that springs from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a genuine faith.”

Another theory is that the wedding garment was a robe that the host gave to the guests as they arrived that the guests put on over whatever else they were wearing. There’s some good evidence for this understanding, and it fits with what Matthew is talking about.

But remember, what is happening here is not supposed to be a precise example of Palestinian social customs. Concern for accurate detail has gone out the window. This is a story about the final judgment!

So, Matthew is saying that, even though the church is filled with good and bad alike; and even though the apostles who call people to the church are not supposed to judge and are not supposed to exclude; and even though absolutely everyone is invited and absolutely everyone is handed all they need both to be properly dressed and to have a great time at the party; still, sooner or later, the King is going to arrive in person, and if you matter, if you are a real person, then you have to be able to say no.

You have to be able to reject the invitation, to ignore the robe; otherwise, you aren’t really there. The guy who refuses to put on the garment becomes a symbol for everyone invited to the feast who, nevertheless, declines to participate. It’s about the freedom we human beings have to just say no to God; it’s not about some weird overreaction to wearing the wrong outfit.

And it’s important that we have this choice, that we have the freedom to say no, to refuse to put on the garment handed us at the door, and so, thereby, to take our chances outside. If we can’t do that, if we can’t say no, then we can’t really say yes either, and we’re just sheep rounded up into a gilded pen.

Our humanity, our freedom, our very dignity demand that we have what the king gave that fool in the story, which is the opportunity to walk away from the greatest gift he could imagine, a gift he had, in fact, already been given.

And the poor guy had to really work at it; he was given all sorts of chances. But the King would not take away the man’s option to say no. The king would not treat him as someone whose actions didn’t matter and whose choices didn’t matter.

It’s the darndest parable. It is Matthew’s telling of the whole story of sacred history, from the beginning of Israel to his guesses about the final judgment.

The story is mainly about invitations, about God’s constant, persistent, and repeated invitation to God’s great party.

And who knows about our stubborn friend who is gnashing his teeth in the outer darkness? The parable hints that the character of the King is such that, sooner or later, he just might send a slave or two out that direction to issue, as he did with his first set of guests, one more batch of invitations. As the Old Testament reminds us, the Lord has been known to change his mind about acts of destruction.

The Rev. James Liggett is rector of St. Nicholas’ Episcopal Church in Midland, Texas. He is a native of Kansas and a graduate of the University of Houston and the Episcopal Divinity School. He has served parishes in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma.

Our gospel reading is one of those stories from the Bible that makes you want to call for a time out or an instant reply. In fact, if the parable was a football game, at least one referee would throw his yellow flag high in the air. He wouldn’t be calling “failure to wear proper equipment” on the man tossed out of the banquet. Any fair referee would spread his arms wide to signal “unsportsmanlike conduct.”
The parable would come to a halt and the referees would confer, talking about how the guest discovered out of uniform was bound hand and foot and cast into darkness. The king is in clear violation of the rules of sportsmanship.

Yet kings have never been ruled on by referees. The king in this parable does as he will, punishing a last-minute guest for not being properly attired. There is no one to cry foul in the parable. We are left scratching our heads, as this is Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of Heaven. Why does God’s kingdom sound unjust?

We begin by acknowledging that Jesus’ parables always catch us off guard.

They are meant to do so. Jesus creates stories that pull you in. You cruise along, listening to Jesus’ story, watching the scenery of the parable as you ride by. Then Jesus slams on the breaks, turns the wheel hard to the left, and you find yourself driving straight into oncoming traffic. Jesus’ stories have a way of getting you turned around, seeing things from a different angle.

Jesus begins with images we understand at once: a king is giving a wedding banquet in honor of his son. As thoughtful Christians, we immediately see the parallels. As this is the Kingdom of Heaven, then the king is God the Father, and the Son being honored is Jesus. Easy enough to follow so far.

The king sends servants out to personally encourage those who have been invited to the banquet. The guests refuse. The king makes the offer more tempting by giving the servants a description of the party. The guests make light of the offer, and one goes to his farm, another to his business, and Jesus tells us, “the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.”

This starts to sound like Jesus’ teaching in a parable that occurs at the end of the previous chapter in which a landowner planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress, and built a watchtower. But at harvest time the tenants refused to give his servants the produce. After some attempts at sending servants, the landowner sends his son, whom they seize, throw out of the vineyard, and kill. This earlier parable tells of God sending the prophets who were beaten and killed and then God sending his own son who would also be put to death.

The parable for today as well as the one that precedes it fit with our understanding of salvation history – God comes first through the prophets and then through Jesus, and some people reject both. Despite the offers, many choose not to attend the wedding banquet, which is the end-times feast Isaiah promises in our Old Testament lesson.

The king gives an invitation, which is so like Jesus. He says, “Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” Everyone is invited into God’s kingdom, even those who were previously outcasts. All is well until the king bumps into an improperly attired guest and remarks, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” The wrongly dressed guest could have answered, “Your servants practically dragged me in off the street.” The man gives no reply.

Then we get the ending that makes us wonder where Jesus is coming from. The king tells his servants, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

This is when the flags get thrown on the play. The whole scene needs to be reviewed. We look at the instant replay and see the moment everything changed. Jesus said, “Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.”

The parable at that point comes to mirror Jesus’ teachings on judgment. Later in this same week before he dies, Matthew writes of Jesus teaching that the Great Judgment will be like a shepherd separating the sheep from the goats. Those who took care of the least will be placed on one side. Those who did not feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, and so on, are placed on the other. Judgment falls on those who did not care for the needy.

In the same way, the parable of the Kingdom of Heaven from today’s reading is a picture of the coming judgment. If we focus on the weeping and gnashing of teeth, we miss the grace of this parable. The king gives a free invitation to the wedding banquet. No one has to earn his or her seat at the table. Both the good and the bad are encouraged to come into the feast.

Guests to a wedding feast were not expected to provide their own attire. They would be given robes on entering the banquet hall. The invitation was open. The feast was an unearned gift, and so was the necessary clothing. For the first Christians, the parallel was baptism. The early church placed robes on those coming out of the waters of baptism. The white robes were an outward sign of the inward grace of being clothed in Christ. Candidates for baptism were washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb as Jesus’ righteousness covered their sins.

As the wedding banquet is the judgment at the end of time, the robe expected of the guests was this baptismal robe. The grace is that the guests, both good and bad, did not have to provide the robe. The king wants the man to explain how he is improperly attired after having been offered the garment needed for the feast. He was given the team jersey for the Kingdom of Heaven and refused to wear it.

It wouldn’t fit with the rest of Jesus’ teachings to decide that the point of the story is that we already have our baptismal robes and therefore can afford to be smug. No guest to the wedding banquet should enjoy seeing others who were invited failing to join the feast. The cost of the free gift of grace was too high for us to feel self-righteous and to show no concern for others.

The gift is to see that even after having his gracious invitation rudely rejected, the king continues to invite others to the banquet. The feast is not reserved for the perfect, but for those willing to be perfected by the generous offer of the host to cover our imperfections with his own robes of righteousness. Far from making us arrogant, this is cause to be humble, knowing that we neither deserved nor earned our invitation.

But as the last line, “Many are called, but few are chosen” hangs in the air, we also see that those who have been robed in Christ are to live into that new life of grace. Having been perfected in Christ does not give us license to continue unchanged. We are to respond to God’s call by conforming our lives ever more closely to Jesus’ life.

The parable may sound offensive on first reading, and we may be tempted to call a foul. But sports analogies miss the mark. In sports, you have to earn your place on the team by your own merit. To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you just have to receive the gift freely offered and then live into the life to which God has called us.

Written by the Rev. Frank Logue
The Rev. Frank Logue is a church planter in the Diocese of Georgia and the vicar of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland, Georgia. Email: frank@kingofpeace.org.